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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 7)

Sramana: How have you structured your technology to support these various use cases?

Krishna Kumar: Our app building platform lets you build apps quickly for these various conditions. We use an agent-based model. That is a cool way of predicting human response conditions. We are mimicking the human intelligence response to different conditions and using that model in a fast forward basis to come up with a set of analytical dashboards 20 years into the future. That information is being used by planning engineers and management to manage their portfolio in a forward leaning fashion. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 6)

Sramana: So your ultimate strategy is to go to market through third party consultants?

Krishna Kumar: We want to empower consulting companies to run with projects based in our technology. They are not going to buy into our strategy if two things don’t happen. First, we need to have similar customers in the market that they are trying to pursue. Second, we need to have a product that is easy to deploy. We have to ensure both the business value and the customer validation for the Accentures of the world to run with our product.

Sramana: I would like to suggest a third thing that you are going to need to fully attract a professional services consulting firm. >>>

Building a VC-Funded Fashion E-Commerce Company: Weddington Way CEO Ilana Stern (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your perspective on this theme that often gets discussed that there’s a bias against women in Silicon Valley. Do you buy it?

Ilana Stern: It’s a hard question to answer. I think I’ve been really fortunate in fund raising, team building, and getting support from my environment. I don’t feel disadvantaged. I am a minority, so it’s not unusual for me to walk into a room of a hundred men and I’m the only woman. I look back and thank my dad for being intentional with me from a very young age and challenging me to make my voice be heard and just helping me build my confidence. It hasn’t been a challenge for me but it is very much a reality that I’m a minority. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 5)

Sramana: Do you have any proof points of your technology working and providing actionable recommendations?

Krishna Kumar: We are very new and we have just started the pilot project for that use case. It is not a tried and tested method from the business method standpoint. We will be working with more established ERP vendors like SAP Retail. There are proof points there about seasonality and inventory management.

What we are doing is taking basic business processes and optimizing them with socially enriched data. We are that extension. The right answer to your question is not yet, but that will change six months down the line. >>>

Building a VC-Funded Fashion E-Commerce Company: Weddington Way CEO Ilana Stern (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you assess the TAM? How big is the bridesmaid dress category?

Ilana Stern: Bridesmaid dresses itself is about a $2 billion category housed within the $14 billion wedding fashion industry. Overall, the wedding industry is $100 billion.

Sramana Mitra: Your growth strategy is wedding industry merchandise or collaborative e-commerce?

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 4)

Sramana: So how have you been able to build a product by combining the Internet of Things, People and Processes?

Krishna Kumar: We have an intelligence layer that sits on top of all of these three components and allows you to build applications on top of that. For example, we are working with an organic retailer in California where we have video sensors that are capturing the movement of brick and mortar customers. This can then be combined with QR core technology to the social persona of that person. All of a sudden, you have a real amalgamation of the brick and mortar world and the social media world. You have an imprint of what that person is likely to buy, which isle they are shopping in and where they are shopping.

Sramana: How do you identify someone from a video and correlate that to a social graph of that person? >>>

Building a VC-Funded Fashion E-Commerce Company: Weddington Way CEO Ilana Stern (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What has been your inventory strategy starting from the beginning to where you’re now doing private label. Can you step us through how the inventory strategy has evolved over time?

Ilana Stern: The brands that we launched with are special occasion dress brands that are all made to order. Essentially, it’s a non-inventory business because the dresses are produced for a specific customer. What’s special about that is there’s a tremendous amount of variety that we’re able to offer a bride with the made-to-order model. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 3)

Sramana: What kind of traction were you able to get with your Bootstrapping with Services strategy?

Krishna Kumar: We were able to get some good Fortune 500 customers using that bootstrapping methodology. We used that as the means to get our first round of funding, which came through Open Ventures.

Sramana: Where is the company based?

Krishna Kumar: We are based in Freemont. >>>